Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.
I don't know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
Lemmy is not a company, it's built by volunteers. If you want a corporate platform go to Reddit.
Contributions welcome.
Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.
Sure if you implement such a feature. Its all open source.
There is no tracking built into Lemmy, however servers log IP addresses by default.
Posts and comments are not deleted from the server to allow restoring them later. However if you make an edit, it completely overwrites the content. Deleting the user account also deletes all content. Deletions are federated, but because this is a distributed system, there is no guarantee that deletions (or other actions) reach other instances.
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
As a workaround you can go into the database and query directly for users with rejected application and email provided. Then write a script to email them. Getting a fix developed, reviewed, merged and deployed will take a few days in the best case. And even longer now because we are busy with lots of things.
Wow this is a great idea. You can make a pull request to link this in the Lemmy docs. Once its a bit more mature we could even merge it directly into Lemmy.
These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it's definitely enough to live. And I don't want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.
Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.